Come walk abroad with me, I said,
And I will answer thee.
Southey.
Attended by police officers, we once paid a visit to a building called the Old Brewery, which infests the city of New York as does a cancer the bosom of a splendid woman. At the time in question, it was a very large and rickety affair, and the home of about eighty pauper families; and we verily believe contained more unalloyed suffering than could have been found in any other building in the United States. It belonged to the city, and was rented by a woman, who, in her turn, rented it out by piecemeal to the paupers. For many years it was a dram shop or a college for the education of drunkards, and it is now the comfortless hospital or dying-place of those drunkards and their descendants. We visited this spot at midnight, and were lighted on our way by torches which we carried in our hands.
Having passed through a place called Murderer’s Alley (on account of the many murders committed there), our leading officer bolted into a room, where was presented the following spectacle. The room itself was more filthy than a sty. In the fireplace were a few burning embers, above which hung a kettle, tended by a woman and her daughter. It contained a single cabbage, and was all they had to eat, and the woman told us she had not tasted food for twenty-four hours. The wretched being, it appears, had been engaged in a fight with some brute of a man, who had so severely bruised her face that one whole side was literally black and blue. We asked her some questions and alluded to her young daughter. She replied to our inquiries, and then burst into tears, and wept as if her heart was broken. The only comment which the daughter made was, “Mother, what are you crying about? Don’t make a fool of yourself. Tears will not wipe away God’s curse.” The couch to which this pair of women were to retire after their midnight meal, was a pallet of straw, wet with liquid mud that came oozing through the stone walls of the subterranean room. This woman told us that her husband was in the State prison, and that she was the mother of seven daughters, all of whom but the one present had died in girlhood, utterly abandoned to every vice. “Yes,” added the woman, “and I hope that me and my Mary will soon join them; there can be no worse hell than the one we are enduring.” She mourned over her unhappy fate, and looked upon vice as a matter of necessity—for they could not starve.
In the next room that we entered, on a litter of straw, and with hardly any covering upon them, lay a man and his wife, the former suffering with asthma and the latter in the last stages of consumption. Covered as they were with the most filthy rags, they looked more like reptiles than human beings. In another corner of the same room, upon a wooden box, sat a young woman with a child on her lap; the former possessing a pale and intellectual countenance, while the latter was a mere skeleton. The woman uttered not a word while we were present, but seemed to be musing in silent despair. Her history and very name were unknown, but her silence and the vacant stare of her passionless eyes spoke of unutterable sorrow. She was the “queen of a fantastic realm.”
Another room that we entered contained no less than five families, and in one corner was a woman in the agonies of death, while at her side sat a miserable dog, howling a requiem over the dying wretch. In another corner lay the helpless form of a boy, about ten years of age, who was afflicted with the small-pox, and had been abandoned to his miserable fate. He had rolled off the straw, and his cheek rested upon the wet floor, which was black with filth. All the rooms we visited were pretty much alike, crowded with human beings, but there were particular ones which attracted our attention. The faded beauty and yet brilliant eye of one woman attracted our notice, and we were informed that it was only about two years ago that she was performing Juliet at one of the principal theatres to the delight of thousands. She is now an outcast, and her only possession is a ragged calico gown. In another room we noticed the living remains of a German philosopher, who was once a preacher, then a professor in the Berlin and Halle Universities, an author, a rationalist, a doctor of philosophy, and now a—pauper. He came to this country about three years ago, supposing that his learning would here find a ready market. This man is master of the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and German languages, and yet a bitter reviler of the Christian religion! He was brought to his present state by the united influences of his infidel principles and the wine cup.
In one room we saw a husband and his wife with three children, sound asleep on a bed of shavings, and the furniture thereof consisted of only a pine box, a wooden bowl (partly filled with meal), and a teacup, while on the hearth of the empty fireplace were scattered a few meatless bones. In another we saw a woman in a state of gross intoxication, whose child, wrapped in rags, was lying on a bed of warm ashes in one corner of the fireplace. In one room a lot of half-clothed negroes were fighting like hyenas; and in another a forlorn old man was suffering with delirium tremens. In another, still, the fireplace was destitute of fire and the hearth of wood. On the floor were three litters of straw; on one lay the corpse of a woman and a dead infant, and another child about three years of age, which had no covering upon its shivering body except the fragments of an old cloak. On one pile of straw lay a middle-aged man apparently breathing his last; and in the opposite corner was seated a drunken woman, a stranger to the dead and dying, who was calling down curses upon the head of her husband, who had abandoned her to her misery. As we rambled about the old building, peering into the dark rooms of poverty and infamy, we were forcibly reminded of Dante’s description of hell. The majority of women that we saw were widows, and we were informed that the rent they paid varied from two to six shillings per week. Our guide, before leaving, directed our attention to the back yard, where, within the last two years, twenty people had been found dead. Their histories yet remain in mystery, and we were told of the singular fact that a funeral had not been known to occur at the Old Brewery for many years, as it has ever been a market-place for anatomists and their menials.
On giving the readers of the Express some of the above facts, a number of benevolent individuals remitted to us quite a large amount of money for the inmates of the Brewery. One lady (God bless the Christian!) sent us no less than ten dollars. In fulfilling our obligations to these charitable friends, we purchased clothing, bread, pork, fish, and vegetables, and, assisted by a couple of servants, took another walk over the mansion of suffering. As we went in the day time, we expected to see less misery than we did on our former visits, but were sadly disappointed. We entered several new rooms and saw new pictures of distress. In one was a very old negro, sitting in his desolate chimney corner, with no clothing on his person but a pair of pantaloons; he was afflicted with the asthma and shivering with cold, while his poor wife was weeping over their wretched condition. When we supplied the latter with food, we thought the overjoyed being would actually clasp me in her arms. On entering another room, we discovered a mass of rags in one corner, where lay an elderly woman who had lost the use of her limbs, and had not been able to move from her couch of shavings for upwards of two months. She was evidently the victim of consumption, and not far from the gateway to the grave. Her only attendant was a kindly-disposed woman who had the dropsy. When we gave her some food, she actually wept tears of gratitude, and begged me to accept a rug, which she had made of rags, probably picked up in the street. In another room, before an expiring fire, sat a sickly-looking girl, about ten years of age, holding in her arms a little babe, and the countenances of both were deeply furrowed by premature suffering. Her story was that her mother had been dead about a month, and she knew not the fate of her father, who had been arrested for stealing some two weeks before. She obtained her living by begging, and when too feeble to carry her infant sister in the street, was in the habit of leaving it in her room under the protection of a miserable dog, to which she directed my attention. We gave this sadly unfortunate girl a large supply of food, and was sorely grieved that it was not in our power to take her from her cheerless dwelling place to some other home, where she might be fed, clothed, and instructed. The act of adopting such a child would cover a multitude of sins. The condition of Mr. Dickens’s fancy child “Little Nell” was real happiness compared to the condition of this living and yet dying orphan. God have mercy upon the innocent poor!
Another room into which we entered was completely crowded with human beings. On one bed of rags and straw lay a woman who was so very ill that she could not speak, and her only covering, strange as it may seem, was a tattered American flag. She was a stranger to all her companions, but supposed to be the wife of a sailor, who had died some months before. Immediately in front of the fireplace, lying on her side, was a colored woman moaning with the rheumatism, and in her immediate vicinity was her husband, suffering intensely with a cold. Here sat an Irish woman on a chest, holding an infant in her arms; she was singing a lullaby, and yet she told me that she had not eaten a hearty meal for many weeks. There, lying in his corner, was a middle aged man, confined to the floor by an ulcerated knee, and he had in charge a feeble babe, which had never been blessed with even a calico dress—it was not only naked, but a cripple from its birth. The wife of this man was dead, and those were her dying groans which chilled my blood with horror when we made a nocturnal visit to this miserable abode. His only helper in his hour of great need was a puny boy, about seven years old, who seemed to be an idiot. The appearance of this child we cannot possibly describe. The happiest individual in this room was a colored man, who appeared to be in good health, but he crawled about on crutches, for he had lost both his legs. He seemed to be an exceedingly worthy and amiable man, and we were lavish in our gifts to him and those in whom he was interested.